Local tip leads to recovery of stolen vases

SANFORD — Fred Smith said he didn’t think there was anything out of the ordinary last week when a man he knew brought him several brass vases for sale.

Smith owns and operates JMS Cleaning, a cleaning and recycling business near the mill on River Street. The recycling part of the business involves buying and selling a lot of stuff, including scrap metal.

Smith said he had known the man and his wife for three or four years.

“He’s brought me stuff, and I’ve bought stuff from him in the past. His stories have always checked out,” Smith said.

Because of the increases in the market value of some metals in recent years, and the rise in thefts of metals from vacant houses and other sources, Smith said he asks potential sellers where items came from if he is the least bit suspicious. He said he checks their stories as well as he can to confirm the items are not stolen.

After 24 years in the business of cleaning out attics, garages and cellars, Smith said he is no longer surprised by what people throw out.

“We are so wasteful; perfectly good stuff gets thrown out all the time,” he said.

So on Monday, Nov. 12, when someone he knew and with whom he had done business came by his shop and asked if he wanted to buy 31 brass vases, Smith didn’t think much about it — until two days later.

On Wednesday, he said, when he arrived at his shop, two friends were waiting for him. That was not unusual either. The two men often stopped by to chat.

They told him they had seen a news story about the vases that he had in the shop on Monday and that they were stolen.

Newspapers, radio and television news reported that 60 memorial vases had been stolen from the Brooklawn Memorial Park and Crematory in Portland sometime between Wednesday, Nov. 7, and Monday, Nov. 12. The vases were estimated to be worth a total of about $12,000, according to the Portland Press Herald.

“I called the Portland Police Department and told them I had bought them,” Smith said during an interview this week.

He said a detective from the department called him back a few minutes later and told him the cemetery had been hit again the night before.

Then Smith got a call from the man who had sold him the 31 vases on Monday. He said he wanted to buy a saw and would stop by later, Smith said.

The Portland Police detective told Smith not to confront the man, just to get a description of the vehicle he was driving and to get the registration number. Instead Smith called the Sanford Police to let them know when the man was coming, and he left the shop.

Sure enough, when the man arrived, he had more vases to sell, Smith said. They were confiscated by the Sanford Police.

Unfortunately, Smith had sold the first set of 31 vases to a metal dealer in New Hampshire on Tuesday, the day after he bought them. After learning they were stolen, he said he sent someone to the dealer to get them back.

“They were very cooperative,” he said. The company had to dig through a pile of brass items to retrieve the vases.

“A week later they would have been in India,” he said. Smith said most of the discarded brass in the U.S. gets sold to India.

Smith said he takes precautions against buying stolen goods. He posts a sign in his shop warning would-be sellers that if he learns an item has been stolen he will work with police help catch thieves. He said he has turned in 10 to 20 people for theft this year.

“What it boils down to is talking to our police departments,” Smith said. There is currently “no uniform way of knowing what’s legitimate and what’s stolen,” he said.

He said police are overwhelmed because in many cases the thieves get a plea bargain and are quickly back on the streets, and there is no information available to tell dealers who the thieves are.

“The police need help,” Smith said.

Asked if he has lost money because he learned an item was stolen after he bought it, Smith said that of the 10 to 20 people he has turned in this year, he’ll probably recover his money from three of them. For him, it’s not about the money, but about what he believes in.

“What kind of society do you want to live in?” he asked.

Police have recovered 48 of the vases that were stolen. Each vase weighs about 10 pounds and has its own unique shape. Cemetery workers initially reported that 60 were taken, but later discovered another 16 missing, according to the Portland Press Herald.

The man who sold the vases to Smith had not been charged as of Nov. 20.